Hilary Devey, self-made businesswoman, star of Dragons’ Den and wearer of shoulder pads that would put Alexis Carrington to shame, risked the wrath of women everywhere last week. She claimed in an interview that ''the glass ceiling does not exist’’ and that women were not on the boards of big companies for the simple reason that they chose to prioritise having a family.

Devey was rounded on for her apparent naivety and ignorance of the rampant sexism that still exists in business. She was, critics said, oversimplifying the problems that women face when trying to manage a career and family life. But I wonder if what she said is so wrong? It got me thinking about the gender divide in medicine, where the glass ceiling is in the process of being thoroughly smashed.

For decades, women struggled to establish themselves in the profession. Women were not allowed to become doctors until 1876 and even then, only a handful studied medicine at university and went on to practice. This lasted until well after the Second World War.

By the Sixties, a quarter of medical students were female. Over time, more and more women have entered the profession and risen up its ranks. But Hilary Devey’s observations about women prioritising family life over work is a challenge that my profession is having to face up to. Not least because of the problems it poses for the future of health-care provision.

The structure of the medical workforce is changing fast. Last weekend I attended the graduation ball at Bristol University medical school. Sixty per cent of those graduating were women. Other medical schools have an even higher percentage of female students. That’s an astonishing shift.

So what will be the impact of this? At the moment, just over half of registered doctors are men, but it is predicted that women will overtake them in less than five years. A 15-year follow-up of doctors after graduation showed that on average, after career breaks and part-time working are taken into account, women work 25 per cent less than their male counterparts. The problem, put starkly, is that the average male medical graduate will work full time, while the average female won’t. This means that the state will get more man-hours out of a male graduate than a female graduate.

Prof Sir Peter Rubin, chairman of the GMC, has already acknowledged concerns about “planning for a majority of the workforce who will spend a period of their career working part-time’’. So as more women enter the profession, we should be seeing a corresponding increase in the number of places at medical school to account for this. That isn’t happening.

While the number of medical school places has slightly increased in recent years, this is only to allow for increased demand based on the traditional model. This problem is not unique to the UK: in the US, Canada, across Europe and in Japan, more women are becoming doctors, but there has been a similar failure to plan for the increase in part-time work. As a result there is a shortage of doctors.

The problem is starting to affect both hospitals and primary care. Some 38 per cent of female consultants work part-time compared to five per cent of the men. Two thirds of GPs are women, with a large proportion opting for less than full time work. As medicine becomes a female-majority profession, this is only going to get worse.

A separate problem is that if the majority of medical graduates are women, then specialisms that are not traditionally family friendly due to the anti-social hours and on call requirements – areas such acute medicine, neurosurgery, orthopaedics, paediatric surgery and A&E – will be hard to fill. There are already recruitment problems in some hospitals and a dangerous shortage of specialists.

The difficulty, as Hilary Devey discovered, is that attempts to raise these issues are routinely met with accusations of sexism. But it’s not sexist to acknowledge that women, more than men, often appear to place family life ahead of their career. Nor is it a bad thing that women want to focus on having and bringing up their children, and caring for a partner. Underlying this is a larger debate about the 24/7 working environment and lack of affordable child care that leaves so many women torn between a career and a family. This is where the real sexism lies. But until there is a shift in the way that domestic responsibilities are shared, we need to accept that most women want to work part time so they can combine a career with family life – and, in medicine at least, start preparing for it becoming the norm.

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Cheap meat will lead to superbugs

News that antibiotics given to healthy livestock to prevent disease outbreaks are actually contributing to the rise in superbugs should come as no surprise. We have known for decades that the more we use antibiotics, the greater the risk that bacteria will develop resistance. The health minister Anna Soubry has said that in order to protect the public, farmers, vets and drug companies need to put a stop to the policy of treating healthy animals ''prophylactically’’.

A large part of the problem is that farming has become increasingly intensive to meet the demand for cheap meat. Margins are tight and animals are housed together in vast numbers and in cramped conditions, to keep costs down.

Of course, this is the perfect breeding ground for infection outbreaks, hence the use of antibiotics as a precaution. Only last year a superbug strain of MRSA was found in the milk of British cows and in pigs, which was believed to have led to infection in humans. It is also believed that a superbug version of E. coli, which has been linked to 50 deaths, was the result of antibiotic use on farms.

After BSE and the horsemeat scandal, I do wonder when we, the public, will at last realise that our demand for cheap meat and diary produce is at the root of so many problems. The overuse of antibiotics in farms will have catastrophic effects on our health. We risk returning to a time when a simple infection was a matter of life and death; when a sore throat or a graze could kill. If we keep on going the way we are, our greed could be our downfall.

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Let’s see older people as a blessing, not a burden

Speaking at the Oxford Literary Festival last week, Andrew Dilnot, head of an independent commission into social care, said that older people are now so terrified of the cost of their old age that they are hoarding their money.

In his 2011 report for the Government he recommended that the cost of this care be capped at between £25,000 and £50,000 to help reduce the ''overwhelming sense of fear’’ that older people have about the fees and bills they may face. Most refreshing of all, though, were his comments that the elderly should not be viewed as burden but a blessing. If only more people could see things that way.